This morning Megan Fox, Ed Helms, and Jessica Alba announced the nominations for the 2013 Golden Globes. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind the event, is famous for nominating films and performances simply based on their star factor — if there’s an actor that members of the HFPA want to hang out with, they’re sure to get a nomination.

But the HFPA is great at putting on a show, and so the Golden Globes generate a lot of attention every year. And, as the NY Times points out, with the Globes nominations coming just days before Oscar nomination voting starts, there’s a possibility that nominations here could affect Oscar voting. The Best Picture nomination set includes what is already becoming a standard set of awards favorites, such as Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty, but there are also nominations for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and Django Unchained. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen picked up a few nominations, actually, which was one of the big surprises.

The Golden Globes will air on January 13, 2013, hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. The full nomination list is below. Read More »

It’s been a big day for awards, as the New York Film Critics Circle kicked off awards season, handing out the first accolades for achievement in filmin 2012. (Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln were the big winners.) Now here are the nominations for the animation-specific Annie Awards, and these might make people happy who were puzzled by the NYFCC award given to Frankenweenie as the best animated film of the year. Those tallying numbers here might want to see more noms for Wreck-It Ralph, but in general the year’s releases are well represented, with the expected nods towards Brave, Hotel Transylvania, ParaNorman, and more.

Briefly: Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation are setting up a pattern of making satisfying and relatively successful animated films, then moving the sequels into the hands of specially-chosen new creators. The company did it with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the sequel for which is being directed by a pair of guys who worked on the first movie under original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

Now Sony has set September 25, 2015 as the release date for Hotel Transylvania 2. The first movie did quite well when it hit a few weeks back, and so it looks like the collaboration between animator Genndy Tartakovsky and star Adam Sandler is going to keep on truckin’.

But Tartakovsky is going to direct the Popeye movie for Sony, releasing in the same window in 2014, and so there will be a new director (or directors) for the Transylvania sequel. Who’ll make the movie? We don’t know yet, but if Sony is really setting up a pattern here it could be someone from the story or animation department on the first. [THR]

Thanks to recent films like Jack and Jill and That’s My Boy!, Adam Sandler has taken prominence as the biggest critical comedic punching bag. So when some people see that he’s voicing Dracula in Hotel Transylvania, I’m sure there will be some automatic dismissals of the film.

But while Hotel Transylvania reunites Sandler and his That’s My Boy! co-star Andy Samberg, the film is also from Genndy Taratkovsky, the animation director behind such fare as Samurai Jack, The Powerpuff Girls, and Star Wars: Clone Wars. His sensibilities are often great, and his touch is all over this new trailer. And while Hotel Transylvania is pretty silly, it is also a film expressly for kids. (As opposed to Sandler’s other recent adult-skewing material.) So I’m ready to give it a shot. Read More »

Though Genndy Tartakovsky has been a force in TV animation since the mid-’90s, it’s only now that he’s finally making the jump to features with Hotel Transylvania. It’s clear that the new film has more of a traditional look than most of his shows have had, but there are some nice visual flourishes that should please fans of his previous work.

Adam Sandler voices Dracula, the proprietor of a luxury resort for monsters like Frankenstein (Kevin James), The Invisible Man (David Spade), the Mummy (Cee-Lo Green), and more. The trouble starts when a young human man (Adam Samberg) accidentally stumbles across the establishment, then meets and falls for Dracula’s daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez). While the new teaser hits many of the same beats that we saw in the first teaser last month, there’s enough new footage to be work a quick look.

This is kind of an encore trailer presentation; not long ago we showed you an international version of the first trailer for Genndy Tartakovsky‘s Hotel Transylvania, but it was quickly pulled. Now we’ve got the same trailer, but with the original English-language soundtrack. So you can hear how Adam Sandler sounds as the film’s family-friendly Dracula, for starters, and the quality is a lot better this time out, so the better monster designs and cute little visual gags come across much better. Read More »

Hotel Transylvania features the voice of Adam Sandler as Dracula, which isn’t exactly the most attractive casting idea for the classic monster. But the film is directed by Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) and that is very attractive — Tartakovsky has demonstrated more than once that he has the ability to mix effective characterization with cute and weird visuals.

In fact, the cute and weird visuals are very much on display in this Russian teaser trailer for the film. I love a couple of the quick looks we get at some of the denizens of the film’s strange world. The fact that Sandler (who may turn out to be a great voice actor for Dracula) is dubbed over by a Russian voice actor doesn’t hurt at this juncture. Read More »